In her book, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock, Gerri Hirshey, former senior editor of Family Circle, recalled riding “blue highways in Dolly Parton’s pink-lounged bus” during the fall of 1978: “Gracing the pages of Rolling Stone—and starring in pneumatic similitude in countless drag clubs—was the seventies’ unlikeliest glam crossover. Country queen Dolly Parton arrived as a 40DDD conundrum—a honey-voiced, Bible-quotin’ sweetheart with a wicked gleam beneath those heavily Maybellined lashes. . . . Leaping off her tour bus in the deepest Wisconsin, I dashed into a Wal-Mart to fetch her a fresh supply of mascara. After three days with Dolly, I felt like I was carrying the Olympic torch back to her impossibly frou-froued domain.”
Just weeks after the Family Circle magazine hit newsstands, Porter Wagoner surfaced again, this time filing a lawsuit against Dolly. He claimed she owed him money for breach of a management contract and for other results from their separation. Seeking $3 million, Wagoner argued that he’d given Dolly two cars, rings, and diamond necklaces. His suit asked for a number of items: 15 percent of her net income from June 1974 through June 1979, 15 percent of her outstanding record royalties, 15 percent of future record royalties, and so on. “This is the only way we could get it settled,” Wagoner told the press. “I haven’t seen or talked to Dolly since 1976. She’s made it big, is out on the West Coast and has so many people handling her business it’s impossible to get to the bottom.” The two eventually settled out of court in 1980 with Wagoner receiving a reported $1 million. —Ed.
She’s gone from rags to rhinestones without а fairy godmother. “Nobody’s got to be ordinary,” says Dolly, “once you learn to believe in yourself.”
The story is Hans Christian Andersen with а Tennessee twang. The little girl had no shoes, but she had imagination. She had no money, but she had love. She grew up in а two-room mountain shack with 11 brothers and sisters, but her dreams drifted far beyond the Smokies. The bits of quartz that glittered on the tobacco fields she imagined as diamonds; swallowing cold biscuits and lard, she wished for strawberries and cream. The day after high-school graduation she packed а cardboard suitcase and climbed aboard а rattletrap bus to Nashville, determined to become а country music queen.
Now, miraculously, it’s all come true. The skinny little girl is а dazzling woman. The bus has become а customized silver coach, upholstered in velvet, curtained in chintz. There are diamond rings on her fingers; her closets are crammed with rainbow fantasies in organdy and sequins. There is а mansion outside Nashville with enough gold records for her own yellow brick road, а movie contract and а million-dollar music publishing company. She has been а Hollywood Square and а Daisy Mae pinup. Barbara Walters has interviewed her, so have Merv, Dinah and Johnny. Everywhere, fans besiege her. At 32, Dolly Parton is а star.
“Sure sounds like Cinderella, don’t it?” says Dolly. “’Cept for one thing. You better believe there’s no fairy godmother in this story.”
There is only Dolly, and something she calls her “rightful thinkin’,” а concoction of fierce optimism and elbow grease that she applies vigorously to make her dreams sparkle and come true. She has been practicing it since she was five and says she came to it naturally. Basically, its premise is this: All things are possible to them that believeth. And things will go along water-smooth if you believeth in yourself.
But come on now. Doesn’t this sound а little too much like one of those instant success ads from the backs of fanzines? Can sheer concentration conjure up а fabulous career, а dream lover, the perfect figure? Can you really think your way to whatever you want?
Sure thing, says Dolly. It’s а natural process anyone can use. Through her agent, she says she’ll be happy to explain it out in Iowa—or is it Missouri? She is on а concert swing through the Midwest, part of а string of engagements that keep her on the road 200 days а year. А schedule is consulted, and it will be Green Bay, Wisconsin.
А skeptic raps on the door of Room 357 in the Midway Motel.
“Well, hi there.”
Hello, Dolly! The exotic creature that opens the door is breathtaking: а youthful Mae West who’s been lost in Liberace’s closet. Beneath а cloud of cotton-candy hair is а pretty, smiling face with china-doll makeup. By the laws of gravity alone, she should not exist. The figure that has left Johnny Carson speechless is poured into а hot pink jumpsuit, swathed in а flowered organdy wrapper and set teetering on а pair of 4" pink platform shoes. Dolly has been doing what she calls “girlie things” before it is time to leave for her show. The room is heady with nail polish and perfume as she kicks off her shoes and settles in on the bed.
It takes а moment to get past the window dressing and focus on the clear green eyes that peer out between layers of thick mink lashes. Dolly’s features are quite lovely, with smooth, creamy skin and twin dimples that deepen when she smiles. That is very often.
“I’m just а real positive person,” she says in her east Tennessee twang.
This afternoon, she is thinking positively about losing 20 pounds from her 5' frame because she’s going to be in the movies. She is going to be in the movies because she thought positively that she’d like to try it, had her new Hollywood agent arrange a screen test and—poof!—a three-picture contract with 20th Century-Fox. Now if she can only train herself to positively resist the French fries and the bread and the rolls and the spaghetti . . .
“I love those starchy things,” she says wistfully. “Good thing we never had money for sugar when I was growin’ up. If I’d a got a sweet tooth I’d be big as a house.”
Rejecting weight loss methods like jogging (“Lord, I’d black out both my eyes”) and fasting (“a real torturous thing”), Dolly figures she’ll have to rely on the powers of mind. “It worked for everything else,” she muses. ‘I believe the mind is a mighty force. Most of us just don’t know how to use it.”
Obviously, Dolly does. She insists it is the powers of mind that have kept her 12-year marriage and her career on a smooth upward track. It is positive thinking that transforms childhood pain into those heartbreaking, chart-busting country songs. Trying to explain it all, she is off like a runaway freight train:
“First it has to do with believin’. I believe that all good things come from God. And after you believe in Him, you got to believe in yourself. You got to believe you’re special. I truly, truly believe that ever’body can be somebody special if they learn to develop their positive qualities. Now some people don’t know how to do this and they get theirselves trapped into insecurities and complexes and all that. I just don’t encourage negative things in me and work at things I do good.”
Sounds simple. But this is no simple-minded woman. In the hills they called her Blossom, but along Nashville’s Music Row they call her the Iron Butterfly. For her fans she will stand for hours posing for Polaroids, but she will fire a drunk or incompetent musician in a blink. And though her first hit was titled “Dumb Blonde,” it was no dizzy peroxided creature that nailed down recording contracts and royalties. It took a clear-thinking businesswoman to cancel her own TV variety show when she decided that it was leading her career in the wrong direction.
“There’s nothing more important as how I feel. It’s me we’re dealing with, the real person behind the wigs and the gaud. I know what I’m after and why I’ve done the things I have. Aw, I’m not real good at explainin’ it all. I just go out and do.”
Sensing puzzlement, Dolly refers me to a book called The Magic of Believing. It is a small, cheery volume of self-help, the kind you find on the racks next to books that tell you how to be your own best friend, make a million and remove stubborn grease stains all at once.
“Hey, that stuff works!” Dolly says. “Now I never needed a book, seein’ as I come to it naturally. But I was gratified to read this one and find I was plowin’ the right furrow.”
Does your whole appearance set you apart from many who pass unnoticed in the crowd? . . . Take a tip from the automobile manufacturers and the Hollywood makeup artists who know the value of eye appeal . . . When you have a combination of proper packaging and the highest quality goods, you have an unbeatable combination . . .
—THE MAGIC OF BELIEVING *
“I don’t look this way outta ignorance,” says Dolly, “It’s my gimmick, I’ve always tried to look as different as I felt. I could have played it safe in jeans and a workshirt, but it left no room for imagination. I figured the way I look would at least hold people’s attention long enough to see that there was somethin’ that came from within.”
Dolly’s customized bus has pulled up to the stage entrance at Dane County Arena in Green Bay. While her band sets up, she will stay aboard and rest until showtime. A crowd has begun to collect outside; elderly women in pantsuits, sweaty-palmed teenagers holding 8x10 glossies of her carefully by the edges. They are craning their necks, trying to catch a glimpse through the tinted windows. It is somewhat surprising that most of them are female, considering Dolly’s image.
“I’ll tell you why I love her,” says a red-haired woman with a husband and two children in tow. “Dolly is everything I never dared to be. Sure, she’s outrageous looking. But just once, didn’t you ever want to do something outlandish—without worrying what everyone will say? She’s got the gumption to do whatever she wants.”
Funny. I’ve heard the same thing from the Perrier-and-lemon set in New York and from homemakers in Green Bay. Dolly dares to be Dolly, a gaudy, spangled monument to a woman fulfilled.
I climb back aboard the bus to try this theory out on Dolly and find her wedged into a corner of her tiny pink and red room, trying to decide which costume to wear. Bits of ostrich plume float from the closet as she pulls out a white sequined gown.
“I just do whatever’s natural for me,” she says. “I’m not tryin’ to promote bein’ a girl. Oh, I enjoy bein’ a woman, it’s been an asset for me. I’ve never, ever felt limited by my sex. As to my fans, yeah, I believe I have mainly little children and women as my fans. I think the children love the fantasy way I look. And women don’t feel threatened by me. I’m too bizarre to be sexy. I mean, no woman in her right mind would want to look the way I do. Still, when they look at me it may touch something somewhere. They may think of somethin’ they might like to have tried, somethin’ different or unusual. Just an unexplored possibility they might have passed up . . .”
Exactly. It’s like circling the cosmetic counter in Woolworth’s when you’re 14, wondering about the possibilities in those gleaming tubes. You’ll never use that throbbing purple eyeshadow. But it’s fun to imagine . . .
Dolly is laughing. “You picked a real good example,” she says. “Now makeup ain’t natural, but feelings are. So I let myself be whatever I feel like, whenever. As far as my looks go, some days I’ll just pile it on, change my perfume, dress up or down. In life it’s the same way. I want to try a little bit of everything, leave myself open to all sorts of changes. I put no limitations on myself. I got dreams so big they’d scare some people.”
. . . Desire is the motivating force of life itself. Hunger promotes a desire for food, poverty a desire for riches . . . It’s the generating power of all human action . . . It makes the difference between the clerk and the executive, the failure and the success. *
“If you been hungry—and I don’t mean bein’-on-a-diet hungry—having money takes gettin’ used to,” Dolly says. “I mean, I’ll buy a set of fake fingernails for $35 and this little voice says, ‘Hey, $20 was all Momma had to put clothes on 12 of us. For a year.’ Even though I’ve got the money now, I can’t be a crazy spender. That little voice won’t leave me be.”
It is a hot, dry Midwestern morning, and Dolly is headed downstairs to the $130,000 coach that will carry her, nine band members, her road manager, a dozen costumes and four wigs to the next stop. Last night’s concert went well, and Dolly is charging down the hallway, ready for the next round.
“As a tiny child, I dreamed of bein’ famous,” she says on the run. “Of bein’ loved by everybody in the whole world, of havin’ money and big houses and cars. I wanted to know what the world was like on the other side of the mountain.”
To that end, Dolly chased her dream the way a child would a butterfly, following it from branch to branch, step by step. She sang in church (“My family was always musical and we believed in makin’ a joyful noise unto the Lord”). She wrote a trunkful of songs and sang them to her mother and friends. She and her stagestruck Uncle Bill dogged country star Chet Atkins outside Grand Ole Opry stage door until he let Dolly sing there at age 13.
“The whole time, I just knew I was different from most mountain people,” says Dolly. “They’re a quiet, bashful sort and that wasn’t my natural self AT ALL. I was talkative—maybe you noticed—and a fun-lovin’ child, real forward. I was an early developer in a lotta ways.” She looks down at the straining silk shirt and giggles, “I mean I looked 20 at 13, liked to wear my clothes close fittin’ and all. But I never dated the high-school boys. I always felt older, strange and set apart. I guess I wanted more than I was supposed to.”
In the hills, where 16 was considered a late marriage and a woman’s place was at the back half of a milk cow, wasn’t Dolly’s undisguised ambition just short of scandalous?
“Oh, it set some tongues to waggin’, all right. The other women were sayin’, ‘That Avie Lee’—that’s Momma—‘her girls is too free for their own good.’ But Momma paid no mind. I owe a lot to her when it comes to independence. Now Momma was the daughter of a Fundamentalist preacher and her people was strict. A woman wasn’t allowed to dance, to wear bright clothes. She couldn’t even cut her hair. Well, Momma married Daddy at 15—he was 17– and the first thing she did was cut her hair. She was so young, she really grew up with us kids, and as she found her own self, she taught us to be ourselves no matter what. Life was hard, but Momma made it seem beautiful. She didn’t have much to work with, but she always encouraged imagination.”
Thus Dolly chased her dream, fluttering in the distance over Route 70 to Nashville. “I was tellin’ all the kids I was goin’ to be a star and they laughed and laughed. Graduation day, people wrote some smart-alecky things in the yearbook, but the next day I was on that bus and gone. I didn’t know a soul in Nashville; but funny, as soon as I got there I felt at home, for the very first time.
“You see, I’ve just always had this thing burnin’ in me, about bein’ a star and all. At bottom I guess I had a pretty old-timey goal. I wanted to prove somethin’ to the world and maybe to myself. I wanted to know, I had to know, that you can come from nothin’—don’t have to be educated, don’t have to be rich or sophisticated—and still make somethin’ of your life. You just got to want it so hard you can almost reach out and grab it.”
Suppose you want a new home. After you’ve got the first glimpse of the picture, start your affirmations going: “I’m going to have that new home. I’m going to have that new home.” And one day the way will be found and the new home will be yours.*
Dolly says she built her home the same way she built her career, starting with a series of vivid mental pictures that would make Cecil B. DeMille tremble.
“My husband Carl and me was dreamin’ fools about a house,” Dolly says, “Every year we’d drive down to Mississippi for our anniversary with this old camera and we’d take pictures of parts of the Southern mansions we liked. A porch here, a pillar there. Then we’d take ’em home and look at ’em real hard, puttin’ it all together in our minds. I knew that house before it was built and I built it long before we could afford it ’cause I knew we’d be able to—someday.”
If Dolly is frank about the way she’s constructed her home and the façade that is her public image, she has also taken pains to sandbag her private life against the flood of demands her growing celebrity has placed on her.
“There are things about myself I can’t reveal right now,” she says with a mischievous grin. “Things I feel might shock people. I’m no goody-goody. I’d hate bein’ a vanilla person with no mystery in my life. I’m naturally curious and I’ve tried a little bit of everythin’ that wouldn’t mess up my brain. But I have a responsibility, you know, to my fans and all . . .”
The fans. Already there are women—and some men—who show up at Parton concerts as Dolly look-alikes. And there are the few crazies who force Dolly to change hotel rooms with calls and knocks. “I’ve only had one death threat,” she says, “and the poor man just wanted some attention. I’m not scared, since the boys in the band look out for me. And like a lotta mountain people, I do carry a gun.”
A gun? Dolly Parton packing heat? “Aw, I wouldn’t use it unless I absolutely had to,” she says. “But all along this crazy star trip, I’ve tried to be prepared for everything.”
Just where that trip will land her, only Dolly knows. She describes her ultimate mental picture as “big, real big” but there are others willing to be more specific.
“Dolly wants to be bigger than Elvis,” says Don Roth, who used to play in her band and is still a good friend. “It’s all there—the huge talent, the glitter, the unbelievable ambition. And now she’s added the movie contract and the mansion.”
I ask Dolly if she sees that mansion as the next Graceland (Presley’s estate-cum-shrine) and the sly grin reappears. “Well, I’ll tell you this much,” she says, “I scouted all over Tennessee for a piece of land with hills in front and a stream around it. It’s got a bitty bridge, and I made sure it’s just narrow enough so’s no tour bus can git over it. Carl and me can walk around stark naked there and nobody’d see. We have chickens and cows and a vegetable garden. It’s a quiet, homey place for me and the special people in my life.”
Only one person knows what Dolly Parton looks like without her wig, and that is Carl Dean, the man she met in the Wishy Washy laundromat her first day in Nashville and married soon after. Described by one of the few people who’s met him as a rangy, good-looking man who runs an asphalt business, Dean never saw his wife perform until last year when her schedule demands made their separations too long.
“Carl travels some with me now,” Dolly says, “But what we have together has nothing to do with careers and such. People are always gossipin’ about what a weird arrangement it must be and all but they don’t know me like he does. The man gives me what I need, which is freedom. And love. And security. He and my family are the center of my life. We practically raised five of my younger brothers and sisters when they came to live with us, and while I don’t have any children of my own, I really feel I’ve been a parent already.”
Cranking up her mental movieola, Dolly says she does see children in her future, but not as a mother. Instead, she’ll be playing the role of the favorite, eccentric auntie.
“I can visualize myself real clear as a joyful old person, sittin’ around all gussied up, tellin’ stories and bakin’ gingerbread and all,” she says. “And I’m buildin’ a fantasy castle on my farm, startin’ on it real soon. I’m gonna make it child-size and fill it with trunks of my old costumes and beads and a projector with Walt Disney movies...”
The voice has become waif-like, as though little Dolly Rebecca is reliving her own childhood dreams. “An’ I’m gonna have towers and moats and secret passages, and I’m gonna let my nieces and nephews and their friends play and dream and fantasize all they want. And I’ll be writin’ children’s books—I got dozens in my head, and romance stories, and some mysteries. And maybe a play. Maybe . . .”
Dolly is back with us now, laughing at herself. “Maybe I’ll even write a book for kids on how to be a success.”
Success is a matter of never-ceasing application. You must forever work at it diligently. Otherwise it takes wings.*
“Where are we tonight?” Dolly asks a security man jokingly. She has just arrived backstage at a fairground arena in Madison, Wis. When the man asks if such a delicate-type lady don’t get tired out by all the travel, Dolly giggles and shakes her head.
“I’ve got enough restless gypsy blood in me that I enjoy bein’ in a different city every night. And besides, like they say, you got to make hay when the sun shines.”
Dolly’s Gypsy Fever Band has rumbled into her entry number and she is gunning her engine, stomping the concrete floor with glitter-shot Lucite heels. There is a mighty roar as she sprints into the spotlight, a dazzling white figure with a high-voltage smile.
Dolly’s concert is a 50-minute Disneyland tour; back to Frontierland with a dulcet country lament, jet-propelled into the ’70’s with a disco number that booms from the 10-foot speakers. It’s an escapist’s joyride, and at the helm, Dolly is a marvel of animation, hopping, swirling, kicking her tiny feet until the lights catch the sequins and rhinestones to send tiny galaxies twinkling across the domed ceiling. And there is the voice, the magical instrument that made it all possible, clear as a mountain stream and just as capricious, whispering one minute, roaring the next, shattering a note so it falls in a rainbow.
“Testify, woman!” yells a man in overalls. “Make the people feel gooood!” Dolly winks at him and he swears he’ll die happy. Too soon it’s over and while fans besiege her bus, Dolly escapes out a side door to a waiting car,
“Remember,” she says over her shoulder. “Next time you see me I’ll be skinny as a fence post.”
Sure thing, Miss Dolly. Positively.
*“The Magic of Believing” by Claude M. Bristol — 1948, Prentice-Hall.
DOLLY DIAMOND
On Dolly Parton Jokes
“I make up a lot of Dolly Parton jokes. Why not? Somebody’s got to start them. There are a lot of them I didn’t make up that I’d rather somebody hadn’t, but I can always joke about myself and the way I look. I think when you get to where you can’t joke about yourself, you’re in serious trouble.”
—To David Reed, Lexington Herald-Leader, March 9, 1979
DOLLY DIAMOND
On Writing Her Life Story
“I’m writin’ it now. But I don’t wanna print it yet, not till it’s all lived. The real truth would curl your hair. When I’m older, I’ll be like all those old haggard ladies that write their life stories, about all the men they slept with, and all . . . not that they shouldn’t. But they’re right to wait so long, ’cause if you start too soon tellin’ about who all you slept with, you’re gonna run into a lot of guys that don’t want to take a chance on makin’ your next book.”
—To Roger Ebert, 1980